It’s our week to draw in as many fudgies as we can, from the dwindling pool of available fudgies, and it ain’t lookin’ real good. I drove through our tourist park, where in years past, was full of campers but today there’s but 9 trailers and 1 very soggy tent.
Everyone blames the economy and the price of gas, but that’s only part of the problem here. One of the main attractions of this place, is the dockage for their boats. Lake Charlevoix is a major league Bass lake as well as Walleye, the Trouts, and most of the Salmon species and many fishermen would come here in their quests. Up until 9-11, there would be 2 million dollars in fishboats tied up to those docks. Their wives would go over to Glen’s Market, or into the downtown area and buy everything in the windows. The dockage, at one time, wasn’t a cess pool, like it is now, but a usable headoff point for some very good fishing.
Between the sediments coming down the river, and the water levels falling, it soon became a land-locked mosquito hatchery and there isn’t anything we can do about it. Earlier this Spring, there was a dredging company here that was going to suck out the town’s harborage, and if there was time, clean out the launch site. When I asked why they didn’t dredge out the marina for the tourist park, I was told that once the water level dropped to where the opening was dry, it was considered a “Wetland” and nothing could be done.
As East Jordan’s luck would have it, the dredger crapped out a couple times before the permit expired the Friday before Memorial Day, and nothing got completed. The town still has several berths that can’t be rented because the water is 3″ deep, and they used an excavator to muck out the launch site. That gives you a real nice deep, steep hole to drop your trailer tires into, but you have to keep your engine half out of the water to keep the prop intact.
The permit expired because that’s when the DNR said one of our fishs’ began their spawning, and dredging might scare them.
Honest to God ladies and gentlemen, I’m sick and tired of our Government trying to keep progress from happening, no matter what the good it could do. I don’t mean just the Federal Government, but the local yahoo’s too. (No offense to the Yahoo lovers everywhere)
It seems to me that it’s the towns elected representatives responsibilities, to insure that the town’s business’s has every opportunity to make money. When the credit/gas crunch came after ‘01, business dropped off at the tourist park. Instead of dropping the prices, to help draw more people, they raised ‘em thinking they needed to make a buck. They’ve done this every year since, and it’s getting worse every year, and they still do it. When the railroads got into big trouble back in the ’60’s, the morons raised their prices to cover the loss of tickets lost. DUH! The City should be giving away campsites, with maybe a tankfull of gas to boot.
The State level show’s up with the DNR; with all their 22 year old college grads, espousing whatever their most popular professor taught’em that year, or through the Sierra Club, which hates human’s everywhere. The professor’s probably haven’t been in the field working, since they were doing grunt work for their PHD’s, for their favorite professor. I’ve seen these guys work, I know how it’s all done, and I’m not impressed, at all.
Every day I’ll drive through the tourist park and see how much it fills up, and report it here, but I don’t expect any miracles.
